Let the children be happy, without the pressure that grades will put on them

The pressure on children is high nowadays. They often participate in many kinds of leisure time activities, they are expected to be social and friendly and younger and younger children start wearing make up and fasionable clothes. As if all this were not enough, the government now wants us teachers to grade them already in primary school. As far as I am concerned, grades are totally unnecessary in primary education.

First of all, grades are a factor which put pressure on young children. In the school where I am doing my school practice at the moment, the children get to know if they reach the aims or not. They can also get a mark called "reach the aims well". This is in fact, in my opinion, a sort of grading. The pupils want to know what they can do to reach the aims well, which gives them a lot of extra work to do. They have to work much harder than what is really necessary and they will always hear that if they want to reach the aims well, they have to do this or that. The pressure on these young kids grows day by day. This pressure comes from everyone; teachers, parents and also the pupils' friends, since children always have compared their results.

Secondly, a pupil that do not recieve the higher grades, starts to feel that he or she is stupid. If we start grading very young children, they will get a label at a very young age, and this label, no matter what it is, is very hard to get rid of. A pupil that is a "good" pupil will always try to keep up, while a not so "good" pupil is very likely to just give up. The "good" pupils will keep on working until they cannot take it anymore, and the less "good" pupils will stop working, since they feel that it does not lead anywhere.

However, many people do think that grades are good, since it gives the pupils and their parents a view on how well the pupils manage and keep up in school. I think that using grades on a piece of paper is just a way of avoiding to confront and to communicate with pupils and their parents. If we start (and keep) communicating on an earlier level, we will not need grades in primary school.

We all want happy children, but a child that feels a lot of pressure is not likely to feel happy. Nor is a child that has the label of being "stupid". By grading young children we will increase this pressure and we will label our pupils, willingly or not. Let the children be children and let them play, without worrying about grades!